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first i want to give some of the background to my fondness for a lady i met about forty-five years ago. my love for her was so clear that it allowed me to be able to explore Love as a heart experience rather than feel i was limited to a gonadal expression. i have remained open to both her and what i have come to value as a heart chakra quality with regards to Love ever since.
the genesis for beginning this tab was first stimulated by the Cayce statement on the Love tab having to do with Love going far beyond what we call The Grave. so after explaining my life long feelings for a lady that i have always loved since i first met her, the next two commentaries regard experiences having to do with my parents. after giving background experiences i follow by sharing encounters with each of them after passing.
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TO LOVE A WOMAN
i actually did have a girlfriend once, and in a way i still do. she has remained alive in me for about forty-five years now and i have been lucky to see her a number of times for a number of reasons. after she turned sixty and i was sixty-two i proposed that we get together to say hello and her current husband approved of the idea. it was a great evening and i got two of the biggest hugs ever from her that night.
i was nineteen or just twenty when i met her and she was seventeen or eighteen. i met her at a social gathering in virginia beach in the late sixties which was a time when a lot of young people were showing up there because of the Edgar Cayce readings and looking to try and have a meaningful life through an adherence to the wisdom that was contained in that information. however, i soon came to realize that she was married when this bushy haired, sort of straggly guy came up to us as she and i were talking. and even though i was totally caught up in her glow, his mental energy began to give me the impression that he had some sort of a connection with her and i slowly had to give into that reality. this did not diminish her glow, it just dawned upon me that all i would really be able to do was appreciate it. i also soon found out that she was pregnant. this guy was quite the “aquarian age” sort and told me how they were living in a small commune and that i could come and check it out if i wanted to. well…. the opportunity to live in a commune and practice idealistic living while being in the same house with this glowing lady was a definite green light to my consciousness.
there was nothing warped in my actions at any time, but being able to be around her was one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened to me. i was in the commune for one christmass which gave me the excuse to be able to give Her a present. so i acquired a box of small sea shells and made her a necklace with them. i put the shells that were left over into a small box and put a bow around it. i had that box in my possession for the next thirty-seven years. at one point while living in the commune she and i were pared up by the house to go to the grocery store and do the shopping for that week. i don’t think my feet touched the floor the entire time we were at the store. she was the keeper of the shopping list and would send me to other parts of the store to get things. each time i would bring her back one of the list items i would get a smile. each smile was an indescribable high. at one time while walking around with her my head became infected by a golden like energy. within that energy and above my head there came an opening into another dimension and i started seeing planets swirling around above my head. those smiles that day, her asking me to get things from the list and those planets swirling around my head have lived and stayed with me my entire life.
however, it was not all joy all the time. as i remember it, the rent for the house, the utilities and monthly food expenses were lumped in to one amount and then divided by the number of males. the women of the house kept everything clean and cooked all the really great meals. thus, speaking as a guy, whether you were married or not, your $25 per month covered life for you pretty well. out of the seven males who lived in the commune, i was the only male who consistently maintained a job. but this lady’s husband was a real slouch and only went to work when he absolutely had to in order to maintain enough money to meet the house requirement. one morning while getting ready to go to work, i came down the stairs and went into the kitchen to find her husband giving her a total ration of crap about how she just did not understand how important it was for her to get up early and fix him food for the day. what made this totally sick was the fact that she was so totally huge with their child and how his “going to work” was such a random thing. my heart still goes out for her on that day. as for him… it was the beginning of the realization that he held no real reverence for much beyond his immediate self image. these were heady ground breaking times which were about trying to bring a forward moving sense of consciousness to a world that did not want to budge. as such, it required a fairly deep sense of personal conviction in order to withstand the very Real human risks that came with promoting change in society. thus, many people not only got lost in their sense of self importance, but were often obstinate for the sake of being obstinate in the face of the real dangers that came with confronting others at large with unwanted change. at the time, these philosophical opinions and definitions were still just forming in me. but just how he (for any reason) could be so selfishly demanding and disrespectful to a lady who was such a battery of warmth and glow was a complete shock to me at the time. if she would have fought back i think i would have smashed him. but she just stood there like a fountain of warmth that radiated through her eyes a sense of hope and a desire to be worthy mixed with obvious embarrassment. to have stepped would have only exacerbated her sense of embarrassment and emboldened his misguided need to feel self important. unfortunately, this was only the beginning of how low and how irreverent he could be.
while living in that commune i had a small friendship of sorts with a lady that had lived across the street from me before i moved into the commune. she had shown some personal interest in me and so i just sort of went with it even though i was quite nervous. i was never very articulate in how to approach a woman. i was so non-manipulative and so more mindful of what a relation should be about that i was not focused on entertaining anyone. but this lady liked me enough to give me an obvious doorway into her life and i just went through the door to see what was in there. things became sexual a time or two and then she ended it. a few months later i got a letter from her saying she was pregnant. all i could think was that it was an opportunity to have a home and i jumped for it. thus began five years of duress because all she wanted was sex and never once believed that i had married her because i wanted a home – even though i worked hard and bought her a brand new three bedroom house by the time i was twenty-one. for five years she drained every hope for happiness out of my heart.
in the beginning of the marriage i got scolded because i was not sexual enough for her. thus, because i wanted a happy home i gave a lot more attention to our sexuality in order to be cooperative. however, even though she was getting things in this area the way she wanted them, nothing else ever improved. in fact things would get worse and life would hold less and less hope for the future. towards the end… at about six month intervals… i would come home from work to find out that she was greatly disturbed and that the relationship was over. it was so disheartening. i just would not know what to say. i just wanted a home. so we would talk and talk. during one of these encounters she eventually just broke down in tears and stammered: “how come you always win?” i was so dismayed by that question because i was not trying to win Anything. i just wanted a home. so… i began to think harder and harder about what love was and how it worked, or should work. through this process of introspection and wondering, i began to Seriously question the value of sex. i wondered that if sex was really so magical or good, then why didn’t the relationship improve? so i then began my disassociation between sex and the concept of “Making Love”.
then one day i ran into that lady from the commune. her husband had ended up in the psyche ward of a hospital from drug use. she and her daughter were very much on their own and i literally jumped at the chance to have a life with them. i chased her with my whole heart and one night we ended up cuddling on the living room floor of her small cottage, never taking off our cloths and just spending the whole night befriending each other. i had never been So Fulfilled. at one point that night i rose up out of my body and went to some special place where i could know whatever i wanted. i saw that i could learn/read why i had chosen my mother and my father and all kinds of Other very Important things. but as i was in that place in consciousness i knew that i was only able to be there because of my being with that lady that night. sooooo…. i chose to immediately go back down there to my body and do whatever i could to make her as happy and secure as best as i could. but in the passage of time i have often wished i had at least spent twenty minutes or so and learned some Valuable Stuff while i was there in that space.
over the next few months she was my every thought. she was fairly devastated from how her husband had mistreated and miss cared for her and her daughter. so i did everything in my power to reconstruct her life in as positive of a manner as she would allow me. she was working full time and taking evening classes at a community college. i soon got her permission to pick up her daughter at a child care place after i got off of work around 4 pm or so. thus every weekday evening on her mother’s school evenings, it was her daughter and i for dinner, for walks on the beach and all kinds of endless enjoyment till it was about 10 pm and time to take her home to her mother after school.
my dedication began to reap the rewards i was hoping for. eventually i was allowed to move in with them and i was beginning to experience a sense of ‘home’ for the first time in my life. furthermore, she was very open to alternative approaches to “Making Love”. so everything was fitting together.
then we found out that her husband wanted her back. he was living with his parents after having been released some time previously from the hospital and was professing that he was cured and just needed one more chance with his wife and daughter. she asked me what she should do. i did not see how i could tell her what to do. i hoped that the difference between him and i should be enough of a clue, and it was. she said she wanted to go on with me but that she felt some obligation to help this guy. so, since he had no money and still had lots of previous friends in town, she wanted to have me move back out for a few weeks and give him a place to land till he got a job and on his feet. then i could move back in and we could go on with our lives.
well…. he came and he took. once he was in that house he preyed upon her to no end until she wilted into giving him one more chance.
she came to tell me the news. i was heartbroken, but oh… did i love her. so i told her i would support her in any way that i could. this turned out to mean that i would use my influence at the company that worked for to get him a job. i was very supportive of him but he slowly began slipping into being a real slob all over again. he began smoking pot like he used to and started loosing all perspective on appropriate values. within six months he had succeeded in shredding every fabric of life that he touched – including the lady i loved once again. but this time she was so distraught, so shattered with respect to her external reality, that she herself became something of a basket case. she called me up one night and all she could to was cry. she wanted to come over and see me. she was in so much need of help – mentally, emotionally, etcetera. she was not sure what was up or down. she had lost her sense of confidence. she wanted to go home to her parents which was 2,800 miles away. even thought it was totally disheartening for me to think of her going away, i just totally loved her. thus, since it was easy to see that she did not have the inner mechanics to consider risking her life with me or anybody else, i dedicated myself to giving her every comfort towards the goal of going home to her parents. her cottage had literally been destroyed by that guy. to walk into it was like going to that camp in the movie of ‘apocalypse now’ run by that renegade army commander. i mean, her life was in total shambles. so i spent two weeks trying to help her collect her things. then the day came where i had to take her and her daughter to the airport and wave good bye.
it was like dying.
at the time i was living in an above the garage apartment at chics beach. the entrance to the small apartment was at the top of a single flight of wooden stairs that went up the side of the building to a small landing at the door. the landing had a wooden railing around it. late one afternoon i was sitting on the landing with my feet on a step or so below the landing. i was pretty lifeless. i did not know what to do with myself. i had met and lost the most wonderfully stimulating lady. what do you hope for after that? before her there had only been strife or disappointment. it was as if i was in stalemate because i loved her and was not in a position to do anything about it. i mean, how do you get angry about knowing that you actually and really love someone? to this day i cannot ever remember being or getting upset at her. to know her was to to appreciate her. but to appreciate her and not be able to express it was numbing. and while sitting on that top step i began hearing her voice speaking to me in my right ear. so i turned to my right and with the setting sun as a back drop was a small bird on the railing about eight to ten inches away from my head chirp-chirp-chirping away at me with its face staring at me sooo intensely. for a few moments there i had a hard time trying to figure out how she could be speaking to me through that small bird. but then i would sort of alternate between thinking she was really there to having to come to grips with the fact that i was probably only being chirped at by a bird. on one hand the bird idea was a big disappointment. on the other hand was the fact that i had for a time there actually been listening to her and not a bird. so what was that bird doing there? and then, there was the fact that i was sitting all the way up there on the top step of those stairs and she had been walking up to while she was talking to me. so, how could she have done that with me being way up there? so then i began to have to start to swallow that i was just really being chirped at by a bird. but that bird was REALLY close to my face and was REALLY chirp-chirp-chirping Right At Me! – no question about it. so i accepted the blessing as best as i could and did my best to just go on with life some how… even though it felt cumbersome.
her parents and her uncle had money and they bought a house for her and her daughter to live in. but she never moved into it. she just stayed in her room at her parents house. she was just too stripped of her inner will. she did not have the nerve to step out and try it again.
i had a bunch of woodworking equipment and decided to furnish her house from 2800 miles away in order to entice her to attempt to regain a handle on her self image. i made living room furniture fore her house but did not assemble it. i filled the back of my 1970 el camino and drove from the east coast to the west coast with the goods. once there i assembled everything, put on the coats of finish and she came out of her parents house and would fix me dinner in her house. but i was too late. she had already started seeing another guy. she had gotten the interest of a dentist. some professional guy with a good income, someone who had Nothing to do with her past, and someone who had no connections to the hippy subculture. he was a totally new start, a totally new type of energy, a totally new kind of person.
i did not like it, but in my love for her i completely understood…
i drove back across the country almost helpless.
three or four months later i moved to california looking for a new life and ended up living thirty miles from her. but i was just too late and figment of her past – a past that contained so many dark memories for her. after a year i moved down to arizona and did my best to begin a new life.
i loved her daughter almost as much as i loved her. by this time she was going on eight years old. so, for the next eight years, even though her mother was married to the dentist, i would celebrate her daughter’s birthday with some really Nice gift and a Nice card. i stayed in touch well enough to know what the daughter was interested in and doing so that i could come up with a meaningful present each year. when it came time for her sixteenth birthday i really went All Out because i figured that should be it. i did not want her to grow up any farther thinking that some old guy would be chasing her around for the rest of her life – that i should just let her become a woman on her own terms.
she grew up and went to the University at Berkly. towards the end of her four years there, at about the age of twenty-one she wrote me a wonderful card and included a picture of herself. she said that she had grown up with the most wonderful thoughts of me, that all the nice things i had sent her had always been such and encouragement and that she wanted to come and see. i just could not believe it. i went to a local park and just cried for a long time.
thus began about about a dozen years of close interaction. that first summer she came down with her boyfriend to arizona where i was living. she spent a whole week with me. the three of us went to the Grand Canyon together. it was personally amazing for me. i saw her when passing through Berkley a few times. later we each ended up living in San Diego at one point for different reasons. i went to her wedding. i became involved with her career with financial support. she wanted to improve her education towards a different focus for her career, so i became involved with financial support for this as well. but after about twelve years the relationship became strained due to the financial priorities and pitfalls associated with financial motivations and vulnerabilities. furthermore, she became immersed in a very demanding atmosphere of right wing christianity which i could not participate in. these two aspects drove a wedge into our ability to communicate with a personal sense of deep honesty. so, for those reasons and a few others, the relationship ran out of gas.
however, through those years, contact with her mother remained appropriate and thus kept her and i in each other’s life to some degree. once while i was visiting her daughter in Berkley, her daughter took it upon herself to set up a ‘hello’ meeting that included me, her mother and the dentist. that was such a gift to be able to see her again. it had been about a dozen or more years since i had last seen her. she was still so wonderful to see and be near to. then there was the wedding. by then i was becoming trusted as old friend and not seen as a threat. there was a lot of contact between her, her husband and i after the wedding. her daughter had taken off on the honeymoon and left it to her mom and dad to move all her stuff out of her apartment and i ended up helping them with some of that. plus there was a nice conversational meal between the three of us after the wedding. after the wedding events it was proposed to me that if i wished to have contact with her i would be allowed to call her from time to time. so, from time to time i did exactly that. at times her and i would have long meaningful conversations about life and at times even our friendship. during these times neither of us pushed the envelope even though i could tell she was not really fulfilled. at one point in one of those conversations she just blurted out in a moment of self realization that she was really disappointed in the choices she had made in her life. it was not said or offered to me as a doorway into her life, but rather as a product of self awakening, self awareness. one day after being picked up at the airport by her daughter and while driving back to her house i was told that whatever it was that i had recently said to her mother had had such a deep and personal affect on her that even her daughter was taken by the affect on her mother. what this meant to me was that my love for her was not only alive but still able to have a useful and supporting affect from my heart to hers. what else can we ask from life except for more of the same?
after the wedding i did not see her again for about fourteen years or so. for her 60th birthday i sent her some photos and a card either physically or by email marking that point in time for her. she responded with marked approval. not long after that i was in the process of moving back to arizona from oregon which would necessitate driving pretty close to where she and her husband lived. and i felt that it might be appropriate to suggest that we get together and sort of have a visit and acknowledge the fact that we were now both over the age of sixty and that we had known each other for over forty years. she presented the idea to her husband and he was fine with it. so we met on evening at a camp ground about an hour or so from their home.
what an evening. it passed all expectations and hopes. i really enjoyed her husband because i could see the growth in him that had transpired in the thirty plus years of their marriage. when i had first met him some twenty years earlier he was a very intense and seemed to not possess a sense of peace. but at the camp ground evening he was very relaxed and had this nice doctor vibe. i was really impressed and in my mind i could only wonder how much credit was due to his wife. i was so happy to have this opportunity to see her again that almost anything could have happened and i would have been satisfied. however, she was the nervous one of group that night. it seemed to take her a while to get comfortable. at times she asked me some pretty hard questions about life, god and spirituality and i was only too happy to have the opportunity to be honest with her. at one point even He seemed to really like one of the answers i gave her as if it had been an answer to a puzzle that they both had wrestled with. by the end of the evening she became quite relaxed and pretty animated. once again she was lifting me up off my feet. it was so nice to see her coming alive and being spontaneous. as things were winding up it became natural to seeing how to continue the friendship. we discovered that the place i owned and was moving back to in arizona was only about twelve miles from his father’s place and that they went there every year for a week or more. so it would be really easy to share more times together – and in just a few months during the coming october they would be down there. i was really encouraged by this synchronism. i went up to him and said happily that: “We could be buddies!” during our goodbyes she gave me two of the biggest hugs of my life. i went on from there feeling so wonderful about the opportunity to have an expanded friendship with each of them.
well…. i guess she and i just had too much fun together that night because i never heard from either of them again. two years later i had a precognitive dream which indicated that the daughter had fallen upon bad times and was in some sort of trouble. but i did not have a current address for her. so i wrote her mother and asked her to send on my request for contact with her daughter and also explained my concerns. her mother came to me in a dream and said that she wanted to talk to me but was not allowed to call me. i was troubled by this because it did not seem fair. i made one more attempt to contact her by email. for the next day i felt her all around me as if she was there with me in almost total heart and soul. then the experience began to fade.
Love…
there is quite and uplifting update to this story. as of now, it was getting close to two years ago that i had that deep dream experience about the daughter who i have often referred to as my God Daughter. it was about a half year later that i succeeded in finding and reaching out to her about how she was doing. my email records indicate that it was in October of 2013 that we reconnected. she was glad to hear from me and confirmed that life had closed in on her, that she was in the process of great change in her life and that she could use a friend. she confided that she was divorcing her husband, has left the confines of the strict church environment and was starting life anew. since then our emails have been thick and deep in terms of life and its meanings and i feel that we are closer than ever. it has been a reaffirmation of life for both of us. just this past Christmass of 2014 i received an email from her about a dream that she had experienced. i quote from her email below as an affirmation of Love in this world.
Her Dream:
“In my dream I was trying to exit a building, it was sort of difficult to find my way out. When I finally did, there was a parked car outside, and at first I could not see who was inside the car. It was dark and raining and cold outside. What I could see were about five brightly glowing orbs shining from inside the car. When I approached the car to figure out who was inside, and what was glowing, I could see past the structure of the car and take a closer look at the glowing orbs. As I looked closer I was overcome by this amazing feeling of being saturated and completely taken over by the feeling of love and acceptance. I let this feeling into my entire existence, and as I did my vision became clearer … It was you inside the car, and you had five red, beautiful candles burning just for me.
I woke up shortly after this realization, and I was awake in my bed just thanking God for your love for me…”
My Thankfulness:
so often in life, Love seems to get shorted by trials and tribulations of growth and perseverance. so, when you do Love somebody, and you hope that your Love finds its way meaningfully into the life of that loved one, it is quite the blessing to come to know that the intentions of your heart were and are worthy to the needs of that one.
Love…
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MY FATHER
my father and i were never really close. i can say for a fact that we remained in touch with each other over the years because of his insistence or perseverance to do so and not mine. however, it came at quite a price for me because along with his involvement came great amounts of judgment and criticism of me, my lifestyle and my general choices in life. he also would show up at times according to his own volition and meddle in my affairs. thus, three time in my life i just had to break it off and expel him from my life for the sake of my own sanity and peace of mind. the last two or three years of his life passed under these estranged conditions. but while on his death bed i was impressed to fly the 1000+ miles down to where he was and go see him. he had many tubes going into him through his mouth or nose, or both, and he could not speak. after watching him suffer like that for an entire day or two, i tried to figure something that i could do about it. at that time in my personal life i was a volunteer doing music therapy for cerebral palsy children by playing my guitar and singing to them. so i figured: “why not do something like that for him?” so i resolved to go to a music store the next day and rent a guitar and bring it to the hospital. but it was a little past a quarter to 8pm and they kick you out of the hospital at eight. so i figured that for now i could at least sing to him. and i proceeded to hold him by his left forearm and sing to him. after about five or six minutes of song he passed while i was engaging him in that manner.
and that was it. eighty-three years of his life and fifty-nine years of my life were over. i went out of the hospital into the dark night and called my son and just cried because it was finally all over. my father had been such a hard wall in my life that i had never been able to climb over – nor him.
then… about two-and-a-half months later i was on my bed late at night meditating and Bingo! he popped right into my third eye just and big and plain as day – with his face and his energy as only He could be – so very mentally intense! coming right into my being an saying with all his worth: “I’m sorry!” that was all he was saying to me. and it was SO Intense it was almost deafening to my very spirit. and after a few moments of that i took my right arm and tried to get my right hand somewhere in between his face and my face and whoosh him away, saying: “OKAY!!!”
after that, for the next couple of years or so, i had him showing up in my dreams quite a lot wherein he was doing this and that thing in many various efforts to demonstrate how he was doing things to help me. it was quite pervasive. and once he appeared to me in broad daylight after i had gotten a call about some good news that had come my way. he appeared almost in full form while obviously experiencing great joy in an expression of good personal fulfillment because he had had something to do with that event happening in that manner.
so, even though it was true that during the fifty-nine years that i knew him we never really even knew or experienced any real trust, friendship or love… it sure changed after he passed. so i now tell people that my father’s passing has demonstrated to me, or reinforced in me that in the end, or in the passing from this world, THINGS DO or CAN GET BETTER, THINGS DO OBVIOUSLY BECOME CLEARER AND LESS MURKY. and i can say that the saying i quoted from the source of Edgar Cayce is for me an unequivocally true statement: that Love does go far beyond what we call The Grave. and it is true even if that love was not really expressible on this side of The Grave.
after those two years or so, our relationship sort of passed into another phase. i pretty much stopped seeing him in dreams, and when i did or would run into him, all i got from him was love and not too much that he was doing this or that.
now, when i think of him i sometimes wonder how or why i had so much trouble with him. but then… after thinking about it a little i go: “oh yeah… i remember.” but even though those memories are not good if and when i focus on them, i find that i am able to see through them to that part of him that did want success in our relationship and did or was trying to do good in his own way.
and then… there is my relationship that i have with my son; because most of my life i have tried to live by the axiom: “Always be a Friend to Your Son.” and when i tell people that i learned that from my father, many get (without explanation) that i learned that lesson the hard way. but be that as it may, i am happy to say that my son and i Are Friends, that we both gain from our relationship even though he and i are more different than alike – and that has been a blessing in my life. he turns forty-three in about a month from the time of this writing.
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MY MOTHER
then there is my mother… what a chore that relationship was… my father’s controlling nature suffocated her beyond her capacity to breathe freely or feel a sense of personal creativity. however, she never took any responsibility for it, could never pick up her feet and bring herself to walk towards the sunshine – Anywhere, Any Place, Anyhow. she just could not do it – even though they legally started seven divorces between themselves (the same two people). they completed four of those legal divorces and got remarried three times! man, what a circus of pain and heart break – neither of which she could swallow. so the entire lifetime i had growing up was basically spent with her dumping her frustrations and negativity upon me because (in her words later in life) i was such a good little boy that she knew i could handle it and she could not.
on my twenty-sixth birthday she called my up. when i answered the phone all i heard was her crying huge tears of regret and eventually saying how she never loved me and that she was so sorry. i tried to tell her that it was all over, that it was all in the past and that we could just forget about it and be friends. i invited her to come and see me, but it was a mistake. she could not let go of the past. she could not accept her dark past without overrating herself (puffing up her self image) in the then present. so after a few days of that i just asked her to leave.
by my late twenties i stopped having anything to do with her and this lasted about thirty-some years. then i had sort of a vision that told me i had to deal with her, needed to work through that somehow. so, during my early sixties i spent a few years trying to do my part to construct some sort of a working paradigm with her. but it was still the same old thing. she still hated my father’s guts. out progress towards a sense of friendship was constantly being held hostage to the fact that i would engage in some sort of a communion with her to curse every fiber of his being. my approach was to consistently try and get her to take responsibility for herself and “move on”, be humble. yet, living through this with her as best as i could, i found that i still had lots of pain stored inside of me that was left over from growing up in all that negativity. through these efforts with her i found ways via meditation practices to release past childhood holdovers of pain and negativity. although she never overcame her disgust for my father, at times we did find our way towards being friendly here and there. i found hope in that and started to get a little bit of a buzz at the very concept of being able to be friendly with my mother. but then, when i was not guarding myself (or being a little too open hearted) she would just turn around and NAIL me. :-) sometimes i found myself just sitting there saying: “man, she just did it again!” :-)
the last year of her life we spent estranged again by mutual agreement. every time she would start dumping on me about the past i would take the attitude that somehow i had to try and be an agent of helpfulness and offer advice about her needing to find some personal humility and “move on”. this happened so many times that she asked me at one point why i would do that, say those things to her. so i just tried to explain that when she would get so upset about the past and my father that i would just take the attitude that she needed help with it and try and offer what i thought was healing advice. her response was that she did not want to be healed. so it became sort of an amicable standoff which resulted in the mutual agreement that maybe it would be best if we just said goodbye to each other. i felt that i was sort of cheating because i knew she would come to regret the agreement because of lonely she was. on the other hand i had already spent the first eighteen years of my life being a punching bag for her frustration, and at the age of sixty-three (with no indication of change in sight) i wanted to move on and spend my energies dealing with my own growth needs.
to her credit she had a lot of creative potential and i think it was the suppression of it that would make her so angry. at one time she dabbled in oil painting – and i remember a really nice one that she did once of an ocean bay scene with the waves rolling in. when she was close to passing i made no effort to go see her and did not feel as though i was negating anything. the whole thing was all just so sad, that there was no real key to the puzzle. she had been in a hospice facility of some kind her last few weeks which was sort of odd because i had just a few years before spent two-and-a-half years doing music therapy for hospice patients in an Alzheimer’s care facility. i got a bereavement card in the mail a week or so after she passed and it took me a few days to figure out why i had gotten it. it was my work with hospice people that i finally made the connection about the card which did not mention her name at all. it was not just because of the estrangement of disconnect between us that i did not go – it was also the fact that she was 2,800 miles away and i was broke and it would have taken a really major effort from me to get there. so it just did not happen.
the evening of the day or day after she passed i was walking in the waves of the ocean near where i live and taking pictures in the sunset. and in this one picture with the sun glimmering on the waves as they were rolling in came her face in that reflected light and i knew she was reaching out to me and saying that she Loved me. all i could do was cry – and i cry now as i write this. it is the only time i actually felt her love in my life. i can remember a few times when i saw happiness in her face and energy while growing up through that ocean experience – but they are but strong flashes reaching out through a lot of darkness.
but the message here is: the only times i can say that i experienced real Love from my parents was from the world that exists beyond what we call The Grave.
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i like the natural context of where i am living now. i mean… to be able to walk outside at 1 AM and hear the ocean while looking up at tons of bright stars… wow! it is just sooo beautiful. or sit here and type after a fun day and hear the ocean in the background… or to be driving somewhere like today and thinking about whatever, and to look up off to the right and see the sun glistening off of an endless looking ocean…. beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
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